What's the difference between - CSV (MS-Dos), CSV (Macintosh), CSV (comma delimited)

Question

What's the difference between - CSV (MS-Dos), CSV (Macintosh), CSV (comma delimited) file types in excel 2010? They are all listed as a save file type, but ultimately are Comma Separated Value files.

Solution

The difference between [them] is if you have certain special characters in text fields; for example, an accented (foreign language) character. If you export as Windows CSV, those fields are encoded using the Windows-1252 code page. DOS encoding usually uses code page 437, which maps characters used in old pre-Windows PCs. If you export as one and then import with a tool that expects the other, most things will look fine but you'll get unexpected results if, for example, you know someone with an umlaut (or other foreign character) in their name.

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Comments

[Lamar B]

The mac options also should convert the windows CR/LF to the mac CR only standard.

[HikeMike]

What about Csv comma Delimited?

[HikeMike]

@Raystafarian OK, so that's the default format. But regarding CSV means comma separated: If it only were so easy. Localized variants of the CSV format use semicolons as delimiters.

[HikeMike]

@Raystafarian As I said, localized variants. Yours might not, but mine at work (German) does IIRC. Yours might even start to when you change the text field delimiters in the regional settings in Control Panel.

[Keith Thompson]

@LamarB: The CR only format applies only to MacOS before OSX. OSX is Unix-based, and uses LF as the line terminator. Does Excel ise the old MacOS format?

[surfasb]

@Raystafarian: It isn't a bug. Some parts of the world use the semicolon instead of a comma. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values.

[Ky.]

@KeithThompson CSV (Macintosh) saves with CR as the new-line character, whereas CSV (Comma delimited) and CSV (DOS) both use CR/LF. I found this out by saving a small spreadsheet and opening it in Notepad++ with "Show All Characters" enabled.

[nixda]

@Raystafarian The Windows setting which costs international firms hours of hours: i.stack.imgur.com/x8NmW.png. German Windows versions have by default a semicolon in this regional setting. And Excel uses this setting as delimiter.

[Gonzalingui]

Although the quoted text says "If you export as Windows CSV, those fields are encoded using the Windows-1252 code page.", I've tried saving CSV files (both manually and using macros) on Windows format (FileFormat:=xlCSVWindows) and it just affects the new line character, not the file encoding. I'm still getting MacRoman encoded files.